[Posted by Chuck Almdale]

On November 7, 2025 the New York Times published an article entitled The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart, written by David Fahrenthold and Claire Brown. The club, more than a century old and beloved by millions, always a defender and promoter of the outdoors, doesn’t come off too well, to put it lightly.

I’m not going to write much about this situation here for reasons I won’t go into. Instead I’ll give you some links to articles written by others. Hopefully they’ll stay open for you to read. I don’t have a subscription to NYT and google couldn’t provide me with a free link to the article, but I came across a link in another article that may continue to work. Those with a NYT subscription can undoubtedly find it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/us/politics/sierra-club-social-justice.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zk8.s4Tz.sWdkCspnaIh8&smid=url-share

Lead paragraphs:
The Sierra Club calls itself the “largest and most influential grass roots environmental organization in the country.” But it is in the middle of an implosion — left weakened, distracted and divided just as environmental protections are under assault by the Trump administration.

The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

Its political giving has also dropped. Federal campaign-finance records show $3.6 million in donations from the Sierra Club during the push to defeat Donald J. Trump in 2020, but none as Mr. Trump stormed back to the presidency in 2024.

And this year, as the Trump administration returned better organized and better prepared than in its first term, the Sierra Club was the opposite. While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.

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Among the numerous commentaries on the situation and the NYT article is one by Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago and author of several bestsellers including Why Evolution is True (2009), a book I highly recommend. On his blog of the same name is his article Social Justice Wrecks the Sierra Club (11-14-25)
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/11/14/social-justice-wrecks-the-sierra-club/

Lead paragraph:
This happens over and over again. It happened with the Southern Poverty Law Center. It happened with the ACLU. It happened with the Audubon Society [emphasis added]. And now it’s happening with the Sierra Club. What is happening? An organization with a narrowly defined but admirable mission cannot resist the ideological Zeitgeist, and embraces social justice precepts that are not universally accepted. The organization becomes riven with controversy, and it erodes, becoming damaged. (This also happened with Scientific American, remember?)

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What the Hell Happened to the Sierra Club? appeared on the Legal Planet website on Nov 14. The writer, Jonathan Zasloff, provides an interesting perspective as a leftist who has worked in leftist organizations.
https://legal-planet.org/2025/11/14/what-the-hell-happened-to-the-sierra-club/

From the article:
I encountered this when I was a “Global Justice Fellow” at the American Jewish World Service ten years ago. Although the organization purported to foster broad principles of democracy and liberalism, staff was much further to the Left. We were advocating for changes in USAID (z”l) policies concerning the empowerment of women, and I suggested to our consultant that one way to reach Republican support was to pitch it as a way to fight sex trafficking. He was enthusiastic. But absolutely not, according to staff. Why? Because fighting “sex trafficking” meant that we would somehow not be respectful of sex workers. (We saw this in the NYT piece when the Sierra Club stopped using the phrase “lame duck” because it was disrespectful to the disabled).

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From Reason (Free minds and free markets: Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent) comes The Sierra Club Went Woke and Now Is Going Broke (Nov 8), written by Jonathan H. Adler, whose name rings a vague bell.
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/11/08/the-sierra-club-went-woke-and-now-is-going-broke/

From the article:
While the Sierra Club’s leadership disputes the Times‘ analysis, the story makes a compelling case that as the Club’s attempted to become more “woke”–to integrate broader concerns about racial justice, gender equity, and so on–it lost focus and support, drove away longtime supporters and volunteers. But according to the Club’s leadership, the real problem is that those concerned about the environment became complacent after Joe Biden was elected, and the ability of supporters to give to the organization was hampered by broader economic conditions.

As the Times recounts, after Trump’s first election, the Club sought to broaden its base by appealing to a wider range of progressive policy concerns, as well as to make its own operations more equitable. Among other things, it supported and buttressed the employee union, which increased the organization’s labor costs substantially. But that was not all.

1. It issued an “equity language guide,” which warned employees to be cautious about using the words “vibrant” and “hardworking,” because they reinforced racist tropes. “Lame duck session” was out, because “lame” was offensive. Even “Americans” should be avoided, the guide said, because it excluded non-U. S. citizens.
2. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the group called for defunding the police and providing reparations for slavery.
3. The club even turned on its own founder, John Muir, with Mr. Brune saying the environmental icon had used “deeply harmful racist stereotypes” in his writings about Native Americans and Black people in the 1860s.

Mr. Mair, who had been the group’s first Black board president, wrote a rebuttal defending the founder. The Sierra Club refused to publish it, and censured him when he published it elsewhere. “Do we want to still be the Sierra Club anymore?” Mr. Mair said he thought at the time.

This was apparently a reasonable question, as the organization, for a time, seemed more focused on investing in priorities other than environmental protection.

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This is a good spot to insert a link to the Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide.
I find reading things like this to be a mixture of enlightening, discouraging, frightening and humorous.
https://smbasblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/32cff-sierraclubequitylanguageguide2018.pdf

From the Guide:
Use the term “cisgender” (rather than “non-trans” or “non-transgender”) to refer to a person who is not transgender, if there is a need to refer to their gender. Cisgender means you identify with the gender you were assigned at birth.

Messaging around sexual and reproductive rights is a particularly sensitive issue because environmental groups, including many members and leaders of the Sierra Club, have used concern about “overpopulation” as a pseudo-scientific justification for racist and xenophobic policies to limit both immigration and reproductive freedom. The Sierra Club has made an intentional shift away from this
legacy with our current focus on gender and rights.

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My last suggestion is to simply read some of the comments on Reddit, a site which combines intelligence, information, wisdom, humor, nonsense and idiocy in unequal proportions. I found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/1or1dbg/the_sierra_club_embraced_social_justice_then_it/

A few comments:
“…but looking back I see a lot more examples like the Sierra Club: orgs that sort of lost the plot because they were trying to either appease their young staff members or be part of the racial justice zeitgeist. My favorite anecdote was talking to someone who was part of an international animal welfare organization who was requiring their foreign subsidiaries to explain how they were addressing anti-black racism….and “we don’t have many black people in lithuania” was not an acceptable answer.”

–Reddit–

Ms. Malone thought that someone else in the chapter had filed a complaint. She recalled an incident when a club staff member had scolded her for saying that the club should lobby Colorado’s legislature for more protections for wolves.
“One of the staff said, ‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice and inclusion?’” Ms. Malone said.

–Reddit–

“The entire discourse around environmentalism is so toxic and poisoned anymore, it’s just pointless to even discuss it.
It doesn’t matter the person, the organization, or the issue – it will be criticized and torn down. So and so was racist, so and so is an old white guy, that group are just NIMBY Boomers, that group hates nuclear, those people are all gatekeepers and colonist, etc.
My favorite are those who deconstruct “leave no trace” as a privileged white gatekeeping activity intended to discriminate against native people and POC.”

–Reddit–

At the height of the 2020 hysteria there were people who considered it racist to think blasting music on trails was inappropriate.
It is kind of crazy to think what a fever dream that was and then how people don’t understand how we had this huge backlash to all of it.

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There’s a lot more where that came from. Just Google “Sierra Club + DEI problems”

The “huge backlash” referred to above affected not just the Sierra Club but is widely acknowledged to have been a significant factor in the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

I recently read that social systems often fail not because of a shortage of intelligence or idealism, but from an abundance of less-than-ideal adherents promoting them. When the blind lead the blind, both fall into a ditch. As someone, somewhere, once said.